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It's not only the top of the market old media like CBS and the
New York Times that are under assault. In the last few days there have been
stories about the travails of the National Enquirer and the New York Daily
News' gossip columnist, Liz Smith, drowning in the digital storm.

It seems the Enquirer has lost a cool million readers per
edition in circulation over the last eight years  down to 1.5 million over
its historic high of 4 million in the halcyon days of the 1970s.

Liz Smith, proud to be a gossip columnist a publicity agent
could do business with, is down to 70 newspapers for her syndicated column.
She cheerfully admits that she may be the last of the breed, and that it
would be nuts to pay the million bucks a year she pulls down for a new hot
print gossip columnist.

Unnamed Washington Post gossip staffers confess on background
that they spend their days reading Wonkette on the Internet scooping their
stories  because she can be up as fast as she can type, while they have to
wait for the next day's Washington Post to be manufactured and shipped to
its distribution points almost a day after the hot rumor has already been
consumed by a ravenous public.

Is nothing sacred? Walter Winchell must be rotating in his
grave, considering that the noble work of print gossip is being usurped by
irresponsible digital gossips. In the old days, you could rely on printed
gossip to be a genuine, certified rumor or double entendre sexual reference.
(Have you noticed that there is invariably only one possible meaning to a
double entendre?)

But today, the public is being fed unreliable digital gossip.
What you read on an Internet gossip blog may not be a genuine rumor at all.
The blogger may have made up the rumor out of whole cloth (or, to update the
phrase, out of virgin electrons.)

Of course, its true that once the fabricated rumor (again, our
language is lagging behind our technology. Something made of whole cloth is
fabricated. But something made up of virgin electrons is "inputed" or
"uploaded"  once the uploaded rumor has been downloaded, it becomes a
genuine rumor.

Still, there seems to be something more reliable, more
substantial, about rumors printed on paper. Behind that rumor stands a large
building filled with hundreds of employees paying federal state and local
taxes. The words used to make up the rumor weren't just typed, willy-nilly,
on some $50 keyboard. When print media was really print media, each letter
of each word of each sentence was cast in molten lead and assembled in large
trays.

Even today, a printed rumor is then processed by large printing
presses. The New York Times spent three quarters of a billion dollars a few
years ago to buy some new printing presses. These are machines that require
good relations with a major financial institution in order to acquire.
Compare that impressive sum with the paltry few dollars a month it takes to
bring a web server online.

The paper, measured by its tonnage, is delivered by train from
Georgia. Oxen could drown in the ink vats. Platoons of highly trained, often
unionized, press operators work around the clock to successfully bring the
paper, ink and words together to form a proper setting for a genuine,
certified rumor.

When those kinds of assets and those kinds of people are behind
a paper-printed rumor, a reader has solid grounds for relying on it.

But today, inexperienced youthful readers are willing to consume
cheaply produced rumors by unlicensed persons in their basements  if they
even have basements. Knowing the type, they probably only have lofts. Having
a basement suggests a substantial building of multiple stories. But today's
decadent youth don't care from where they get their rumors. Just like the
steel and other heavy manufacturing industries, the paper-printed rumor
business is being hollowed out. Digital rumor manufacturing is to the rumor
industry what ten cents per month Chinese wage rates are to the steel
industry.

The impending death of the paper-printed rumor business should
be a warning to the news divisions of those papers. While the newspaper's
rumor department is at a competitive disadvantage with the digital rumor
blogs, the news departments actually have some advantages  if they choose
to use them. Hundreds of trained reporters and editors, if they are
committed to objective news gathering, can actually produce more usable,
objective news each day than even the most hard-working blogger. But if they
print rumor and prejudice masquerading as news, they will surely go the way
of their official, certified rumor departments.

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